The San or Bushmen people of Southern Africa , descending from the Stone Age people, are believed to be the oldest living genetic stock of contemporary man.
The Bushmen settled in small groups in Southern Africa about 20 000 years ago. They can be distinguished by their small stature and language consisting of click sounds. They don’t use metal weapons, but rely solely on wood, stone and bones, using ostrich sells in which to store and transport water obtained from plants and wholes made in the desert.
Traditions and History of the Kalahari Bushman
The San are traditionally hunter-gatherers, eating plants, mushrooms, bulbs, berries, bird’s eggs, wild honey and game. In earlier days, Bushmen living close to the coast were experts at fishing, with mussels and crayfish forming an important part of their diet.
These hunter- gatherers used to move around in groups of up to 25, usually in a vast desert land, that was shared by the whole group. Bushmen are egalitarian and peace loving. Since they don’t have a government, they resolve disputes among themselves. They have no class differences, and even the roles between the different sexes are not very well defined.
Over the centuries the Bushmen were in regular conflict with the cattle farmers called Koi, as well as with indigenous black South Africans and white colonialists.
Current Situation of the Bushmen
Currently there are only a few small groups of Bushmen left, scattered over Southern Africa.
World attention was focused on these groups in the late twentieth century by Jungian writer and philosopher Sir Laurens van der Post, who described them as the gatekeepers to the unconscious: “I sought to understand imaginatively the primitive in ourselves, and in this search the Bushman has always been a kind of frontier guide.”
The Bushmen as Minority Group in Botswana.
The Gana and Gwi groups of Bushmen were evicted from their ancestral land in the Central Kalahari by the government of Botswana under Pres. Ian Khama in 2002. They were dumped in settlement camps. It was then ruled by the Botswana High Court that the Bushmen have the right to remain on their ancestral ground, but after this ruling the Botswana government has banned the Bushmen from accessing water from a borehole from which people and animals in the reserve are provided with water.
Despite calls from human rights organizations and the Bushmen themselves, pres. Ian Khama refuses to discuss the issue, calling the Bushman way of life “an archaic fantasy”.
The Bushmen recently lost a court battle to access water on their lands, making the survival of this already threatened indigenous minority extremely difficult.
Fransi Phillips - Published author of poetry, short stories, novels, art books in Afrikaans and English Writer of art reviews in Afrikaans and English ...
